


Pay No Worship to the Garish Sun

by isellys



Category: Subarashiki Kono Sekai | The World Ends With You
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Zombies, M/M, Suicidal Thoughts, Zombie Apocalypse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-29
Updated: 2015-01-29
Packaged: 2018-03-09 14:31:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,303
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3253241
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/isellys/pseuds/isellys
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The moral of the story is: the end of the world is the best time to pick up hitchhikers.</p><p>It is also the worst time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pay No Worship to the Garish Sun

Brains splatter the clean white walls of the supermarket. The zombie catapults, neck-stump first, into the space on the wall just below the gruesome stain. Joshua sidesteps in order to avoid getting any of the gunk on his shirt. A foul cloud assaults his sense of smell anyway. _Funnily enough_ , Joshua thinks, _the virus isn't airborne. Although if it got any more efficient I'd have to run for some very high hills. Or wait for the Rapture._ As he considers this, he spots a pristine bottle of Acqua di Parma shampoo sitting on the nearest shelf and Joshua grabs it, stuffing it into his bag. He takes a lock of his hair and pulls it into the light. Split ends. What an awful way to end a perfectly good day of zombie-slaying.

“Really, Josh? Not food first or anything? _Shampoo_?”

Neku lowers his gun, scowling at Joshua. _His_ hair, now, is a mess. Joshua supposes that now the world has ended, he can stand to share some shampoo, even if it is for a lost cause. With this magnanimous thought in mind, he smiles at Neku and takes some matching conditioner, and, hey, shower gel! Just because the world is ending doesn’t mean you have to smell like it. Joshua is pretty sure Neku only showers because Joshua tells him to.

“Do you like Fresh Peaches and Cream,” says Joshua, holding up one large pink bottle in his right hand, and a translucent purple one in his left, “or Lavender Delight? I was thinking the first smells yummier, but the second is more soothing. We could use soothing at a time like this.”

“Do what you want. I’m gonna go find us some food,” Neku announces, throwing his hands up in a gesture of defeat. On the shelf there is another bottle of shower gel that says Cherry Blossoms and Sandalwood, which Joshua snatches. He puts back the other two bottles and walks after Neku.

After shopping, they sit in the supermarket’s parking lot. There are a few cars, some in serviceable condition, some beaten to unrecognizable metal heaps, most splattered with biological matter. It’s warm out. The heat lingers on the sidewalk, touches Joshua as he sits on the concrete. Neku passes him a plump orange.

This bright, rubbery shock of color sits in Joshua’s hand. He raises it up in front of his face and there it is: a miniature eclipse, the sun reduced to a ring of fire by this tiny little thing, still whole and pristine in a dying world. It’s the small miracles that keep them going. Neku’s already digging into his, the juice staining his fingers and sides of his mouth; he is sitting still, unhurried. Joshua starts peeling the fruit he’s holding. He plucks one segment from the sphere and places it in his mouth.

It tastes much better than his memories of the flavor of oranges.

“How is it?” Neku asks.

“Perfect,” Joshua sighs. “Luckily, I had to foresight to take some hand sanitizer earlier, so our fingers won’t stay sticky for long.”

Neku rolls his eyes and tells him off for being smug, but holds his hands out for Joshua to pour some sanitizer on his hands anyway. Joshua squeezes out a generous amount of transparent goop, using his own hands to spread them all over Neku’s. He looks startled, but he doesn’t pull his hands away. Beneath Joshua’s palms there is warm, smooth skin—Neku’s never lived a rough life before the plague, but he has adapted to the post-apocalyptic lifestyle well enough.

In the old days, where people had work and hobbies, films and books, there were lots of things to distract one from other people. Not now, though; there’s nothing now except for survival and, if one is (un)lucky enough, human company. Two weeks is plenty to get to know a person, so when Neku gets up, mumbling, “We should grab a ride,” looking anywhere but at him, Joshua knows that he’ll shift most of his weight to one of his feet and look to some point to the left of the horizon’s midpoint. The sun casts a yellow mask on his face. Orange peels litter the asphalt around his feet, like little bright bits of shed skin.

“Let’s not get ourselves a sedan this time,” Joshua suggests. Of all the cars he’s pictured himself dying in, a sedan had never been one of them, and he very nearly died in one. They take stock of the undamaged cars. Most of them have terrible locks or uncomfortable seats. Finally Neku hotwires a dusty dark blue Volvo wagon—which makes Joshua feel a bit like a middle-aged father with two rowdy kids the moment he gets in it, but it’s functional, comfortable, and not noisy enough to attract zombies.

He tells Neku: “You know, any time now a five-year-old zombie is going to ask us, ‘are we there yet?’”

“Always wanted to whack a five-year-old in the face with the butt of a shotgun,” Neku answers without missing a beat.

Joshua laughs. Neku’s sense of humor is suited to the era they find themselves in.

“How oddly specific. What did five-year-olds ever do to you, partner?”

Joshua doesn’t expect a real answer, and he watches Neku’s face for the signs of a clever little jab, some sharp insult, but slow-burning surprise illuminates Neku’s features. This, Joshua is starting to learn, is how Neku looks when he starts remembering something about his old life. It widens his eyes and stretches them sea-blue.

“I was in middle school, right,” Neku pulls the car out of its parking spot, looks behind them for a quick moment, “and I had to do this community service thing because my school was _whack_. So I was like, how do I keep these screaming kids entertained for five hours? Then it hit me: Uno. It was a pretty great solution. Everyone was having fun and laughing when this one girl I made friends with—we hated the same things, complained about them together—decided to be a complete bi—“ Joshua raises an eyebrow, and Neku snorts, “—okay, this _kid_ , she skipped me five turns in a row and when she ran out of skips, she pulled a wild draw four! And she chose the _only color I didn’t have_.”

“Well. That _does_ sound like a traumatic experience.”

“Never suffered a worse betrayal in my life,” Neku half-murmurs wonderingly. The remark lacks bite; the memory has sweetened Neku’s voice into something breathless.

“I’m sure,” Joshua says mildly. A dancing Hawaiian girl bobbles excitedly on the dashboard, as if begging for someone to put on some music; he indulges her by humming a tune. Sanae had taught it to him one night out in the cold, before the world came crashing down. Without really thinking about it, he flips open his phone and checks for new text messages. Nothing. He glances out the window.

Outside, the sun is perhaps getting ready to set. What does it care for the humans below it, who die every day and rise up again? What he wouldn’t give to be like the sun: high above it all. Joshua glances at the rear-view mirror and catches Neku’s eye. He winks at him, saying coyly that he knows he is a distracting sight, but just because the world has ended it doesn’t mean Neku shouldn’t keep his eyes on the road. Neku averts his eyes, scowling.

* * *

The hand on his wristwatch tells him it’s been twenty minutes since the family started squabbling about who gets to die first. Joshua understands; they want to minimize the amount of suffering, but seeing as they’ll all be dead in less than an hour, he’s starting to lean more and more towards the idea of taking one member randomly to the back, shooting him or her, and repeating. It doesn’t matter in the end. People die and decompose, and now, more than ever, what someone feels before they die doesn’t matter one bit after.

“Have you decided?” he asks. “I kind of want to get this over with before the disease really kills one of you, which would mean I’d have to actually deal with a zombie.”

They snap to attention. Mrs. Sato frowns at him.

“Do you have a solution?” she demands. Her arms are crossed and mascara is smudged across her cheek. The youngest child, Masaki, is clinging to her hip; the zombie bite is well-hidden underneath the bandage around his wrist. He has big eyes and thick, dark hair, and if he had been born any other time, he might have grown up to be handsome.

Joshua thinks for a moment. There are three children: the first is Haruka, the fifteen-year-old girl, who closes her eyes and prays, mouth moving, with no sound; the second is a twelve-year-old boy, Makoto, who is crying into his shirt; the last is seven years old and shaking with fear.

“We’ll take care of the kids first,” he says, walking back and forth in front of them. Haruka looks up at him through her wire-rimmed spectacles and attempts to look brave. Perhaps she might not even cry before Joshua shoots her. “Oldest to youngest; and then you, Mrs. Sato, and you, Mr. Sato. You _could_ ask me to explain my decision to you, but then you’d probably try to argue with me, and we just don’t have the time.”

They look at him in stunned silence. Finally, Mrs. Sato nods, albeit very slowly. The rest of the family follows suit.

“Excellent. Come on, Haruka, we have a date,” he says. This isn’t a pleasant thing to do, but someone _has_ to do it, and it might as well be someone who isn’t squeamish. When he holds out his hand to her, she is shaking, but she doesn’t collapse when he pulls her up out of her seat. Her mother, father and siblings embrace her, a mess of tears and hiccups, smudging together. Joshua watches this and waits. They release her eventually, but Mr. Sato’s fingers linger around her arm. Joshua takes the other and pulls her away.

Afterwards, Sanae approaches him. Joshua is patting down the earth on the fifth grave—Mr. Sato’s—with his hands. He doesn’t look up, but he can already see the expression on Sanae’s face: that pensive, near-unreadable look, the one that hasn’t changed since they first met when Joshua was fifteen. Then Joshua stands, dusting off his hands, and turns to confirm what he already knows.

“Hey, J,” Sanae says quietly.

Joshua announces: “I’m leaving.”

“What?”

It is a good thing that Sanae is completely hopeless at looking like a sad puppy, because otherwise Joshua would never get anything done.

“You can take care of my _duties_ ,” Joshua says this with an ironic little smile, “while I’m away, I’m sure. The Satos have kindly given everything they’ve collected to me, so I’ll be fine on my own. No, really, don’t look like that, I’ll be completely fine. You know me.”

“You’re not gonna explain why?”

He walks towards the Satos’ camp and calls over his shoulder that he’s only going to do a little soul-searching. When he arrives at his destination, he glances behind him, and sees that Sanae has stopped following him. He knows a lost cause when he sees one. Joshua looks around and gets to work. His hands move automatically; his mind is blank; Joshua once held many stories in his hands but they are all gone now.

When he next sees Sanae he’s starting the Satos’ car. The older man has his shades off; they’re in his pocket, and they bounce a little when he runs towards Joshua. Maybe he could have a lifetime of this, of Sanae trying to stop him from doing stupid things and failing. Sanae’s hands rest on the base of the opened window. The sun’s glare is harsh behind him, making Joshua squint, but he makes an effort to keep looking Sanae in the eye anyway.

“If you get to our old workplace,” Sanae says, so casually that for a moment, they could pretend they used to work in a coffee shop or an insurance firm, “see if we can still get any work done there, yeah? Oh, and J—don’t forget to text me.”

“Yes, yes, or you’ll start showing withdrawal symptoms, I know,” he quips, but Joshua doesn’t want those to be his parting words (he couldn’t care less if it were anyone else). He adds, “Stay safe. When I come back, there’d better be a party waiting. Have fun without me in the meantime, though.”

“Aye, aye, captain.”

Sanae salutes him and asks him how long Joshua will be away. He lies easily, saying he’s going to be gone for two months. As he drives away, Joshua does something he knows is dangerous, but he can’t help it; he keeps looking back at the figure that grows smaller and smaller, one hand raised in casual farewell. He takes in the sight of his oldest friend: the sharp bones of his face, the five o’clock shadow, his dark, dark eyes. There are pictures on his phone but it isn’t the same. His phone camera has never been able to capture his easy grace or the warmth of his presence. Joshua lets himself get sentimental this one time, even if it’s far too late to save anything.

Hours later, there is no light save for the misty circles coming from the headlights of the Satos’ car, and Joshua nearly runs over a man.

The car jerks to a halt. Joshua leans forward and sees someone who obviously isn’t a zombie gesturing at him animatedly, yelling. What kind of idiot is out at this hour, he wonders, so he rolls down the window.

“Thanks for almost killing me,” says the stranger. He has spiky orange hair and an unfriendly face.

Joshua smiles his least pleasant smile, saying, “You’re very welcome. Thank _you_ , for lumbering right into the path of a moving car. But what am I saying? Of course it was my fault.”

The man huffs. He seems to be about Joshua’s age. The air of youth rests about him in a buzz of energy and impatience that has no place in the era of now (that is, the era of zombies). Then, Joshua sees his face properly for the first time: his blue eyes, tall nose, his frowning mouth. A frozen wave of recognition washes over him. The memory creeps in the back of his mind and Joshua forces it down; the coldness in his hands recedes as he does so. He makes himself ask for the young man’s name.

“I’m Neku Sakuraba,” he says, and Joshua could’ve mouthed it along with him, “mind if I hitch a ride?”

Joshua considers this.      

“Fine, you can get in. But I’ll have to check you for bites.”

Neku says thank you as he slides into the back seat, his gym bag thudding right beside him. The scent of someone who needs a shower quickly fills the car. Neku, seemingly oblivious to Joshua's expression of displeasure, closes the door then asks: “How are you gonna do that?”

“Strip down.”

For good measure, Joshua locks the car doors and turns so he can properly smile at Neku, who is pleasingly expressive. He thinks he might have to dig out the list of priceless reactions and bump Minamimoto down the second place, really. Then he digs out the flashlight from the glove compartment, pointing it at Neku wordlessly while raising an eyebrow and smirking as suggestively as possible. Neku gapes at him like Joshua has just asked him to, well, take off all his clothes; when Joshua shines the flashlight in his face, his tonsils are visible.

“Are you _nuts?_ ”

“On the contrary. I’m just a little paranoid; I shouldn’t think you’d find that all that weird, times being what they are,” Joshua says lightly. “Now if you don’t agree I’m going to kick you out or blast your brains all over the back seat, which would be a shame, since I just got this car. So what’s it going to be, partner?”

There is a long, indignant pause on the hitchhiker’s end. Finally, looking resigned, Neku sighs and starts removing his clothes. Joshua only checks him out a _little_ bit. At least the universe is nice enough to grant him a hitchhiker with nice abdominals. When Joshua shines the flashlight at Neku’s underwear, Neku glares at him while giving him the bird. He manages this while tugging on his shirt, which, Joshua will never admit, is actually kind of impressive.

“No, no, _no_. I’m drawing a line. My underwear stays _on_. If a zombie took a bite out of that, do you really think I’d be walking around right now?”

“Fair point,” Joshua concedes. “You’re all clear. Put your clothes back on, it’s going to be cold. My name’s Joshua, by the way, since you never asked.”

Neku sounds embarrassed as he mumbles, _right, meant to do that_. What will happen now, he wonders, with Neku like this, sitting just behind him. The situation is almost laughable. Panic—a bloated, cackling bubble of it—wells up in his chest; glee follows soon after, like a fluttering of twelve hearts in one chest. What were the odds? If life were a game of cards, what were the odds of this particular hand being dealt? When he tries to do the math he discovers that he's forgotten most of it, the permutations and combinations and probabilities, but fuck it. His mind hasn't touched numbers for what feels like a lifetime. The most taxing mathematical task he's had to complete since The End was counting the number of soup cans they had left. The silence stretches on, and Joshua remembers something like it: the fluttering of curtains, Sanae fidgeting without a cigarette in his hands, the white of the walls steadying Joshua as he stares at a beeping monitor. A miracle, Sanae called it. _Someone up there’s looking out for you_. Joshua had looked out the window, where a raven was screeching past.

“ _Fuck!_ ” Neku yells, pushing himself forward. Joshua steers the car back on track. “Are you falling asleep, or something? You want to switch and let me drive?”

“I’m not letting you control our destination after roughly forty minutes of knowing you, no matter how cute you are, Neku,” Joshua says. “Although, hm. Why don’t you tell me about a little about yourself? If we’re going to journey together, we should try to get to know each other as _intimately_ as possible. Make it interesting so my mind won’t drift.”

“ _Make it interesting._ Wow, aren’t you just the humblest dude on the block.” There’s a sliding sound as Neku readjusts his sitting position in the back seat. “Let’s see. I’m Neku, you knew that already…”

_Anyone we should notify?_

_Hm. He has a dad, but when I contacted him he didn’t seem concerned at all._

“…there was this bridge, and I don’t know what happened—next thing I knew she was looking at me from across this, this valley…”

_Any close friends?_

_Just colleagues. Classmates. Wasn’t the friendly type, apparently._

“How do you plan on finding this girlfriend of yours? Although I must say, I was hoping to find you unattached.”

“She’s not my girlfriend; Shiki’s just… Shiki, I guess. And I don’t know. I guess I’m just gonna keep looking, move from camp to camp. We promised each other that if something like this ever happened, we’d find the nearest human settlement,” Neku says. “I lost her about, I don’t know, ten kilometers from here? So if you know of any nearby camps or something, let me know.”

Joshua chuckles at the coincidence, and if he offends Neku, he doesn’t care. Sanae had told him: _the different parts of life have a way of fitting together, J. Just like a puzzle. First time I set foot in this place, I almost spilled coffee all over you. You weren’t too happy ‘bout it._

“I have some good news for you: I’ve just _left_ the closest human settlement. After I reach my destination, I might just be driving back.”

“Crap,” Neku says slowly, disbelievingly, “I’m _really_ stuck with you now, huh.”

“Don’t be like that, partner. I’m sure we’ll get along like a house on fire. That’s what they say, isn’t it?”

“You know, I don’t get that idiom.”

“Me neither.” A beat. “Well. That’s _something_ we have in common.”

* * *

“You’ll have to sleep sometime, Neku,” Joshua remarks. Stubbornly, Neku shakes his head. It would be amusing, and it is, because Joshua knows Neku really does have a good reason for not trusting him. Neku can’t know that. He keeps his distance anyway, looking over at Joshua furtively when he thinks Joshua can’t sense it.

He keeps his gun on him at all times.

So when sleepy-eyed Neku sits with his back to a sturdy wall with peeling paint, Joshua leans back just inches away from him, tilting his head and smiling. There it is, that flash of fear, as though Joshua could tear at his throat any time now, with blackened teeth and bloated fingers. Then it fades away into a steely mirror of suspicion. The hostility is palpable. For a tiny beat it looks like Neku is about to reach for his gun, but he remembers where he is and puts down his hand. Still smiling, Joshua uncrosses his legs, stretching them out in an exaggerated gesture. He wiggles one foot hard enough that the shoe slips off, then uses that foot to push off the other shoe.

“It’s natural to distrust others. Especially at a time like this.”

“Look who’s talking.”

“Me? I trust you with my life, dear.”

Neku snorts derisively.

“Please. You act all friendly, like some creepy pervert, but we both know you’re keeping your distance. You think you’re subtle. At least I don’t bother to hide it.”

It isn't that Joshua thinks he's subtle. It's just that most people make all the right assumptions about him based on the way he acts. Neku, however, obviously hasn't done that. There is a lot about Joshua that anyone might find suspicious, but it's been years before he's talked to someone who isn't willing to ignore the skeletons in all the other closets because they've got skulls and bones of their own to hide. Minamimoto had his manic grin and mathematics; Konishi her scalpel precision; Megumi an enigma's words; Sanae is Sanae, with smoke in and out his lungs and dark mirrors in front of his eyes. Joshua, in his second year at the facility, had effectively chosen the nickname Twinkle Toes for himself. It seemed appropriate.

“So what do you propose? I’m not opposed to moving just a little,” Joshua edges in so that his arm presses against Neku’s, “closer.”

Neku stiffens, tenses up, but doesn't budge.

“Tell me something about yourself. Someone told me that everyone has something to say, and it’s always important to listen. You never know how much they might need it,” Neku says, in a faraway voice. Immediately after saying it, he looks embarrassed and ducks his head. "There's something about the old world that each of us misses. Not just, you know, stuff like being able to take a dump without having to bring a shotgun. Personal stuff."

“Was it someone special who told you all this?”

“They're Shiki's words. Don’t change the subject, Josh,” Neku slurs a little drowsily. “Just tell me something. Don't give me some BS that's meant to be a big joke or whatever. Something the old you used to do that you can't anymore because the world went to crap.”

“Fine,” Joshua says softly. His brain screams at him to stay quiet, to spin a tale as easily as he spins entire histories, entire lives, but a concert hall stretches out before him, faintly, the last few claps of an applause echoing, and he ends up saying: “I used to play the violin and the piano. I was very, very good.”

“Yeah? Tell me more.”

It’s dark and dank. The air stinks, strains against his nostrils. Neku’s arm is still and warm against his; he can feel him breathing, slowly, deeply, but not deeply enough to be asleep. With a tone as flat as he can muster, Joshua starts to talk about music. When he talks he can still hear the song of an instrument in his hand; see a score scrolling before his eyes. His fingers twitch to the rhythm of a waltz and recoil at the memory of a particularly difficult Rachmaninoff that seized him with an iron grip when he was seventeen. This is the room that hears Joshua recount his attempt to match A Musical Offering; the dimming little bulb overhead is not the light, he remembers, that lights up the music room in his house; the ticking of a half-broken clock is a close match to the metronome he got a year before he met Sanae. Neku is so quiet Joshua almost believes that he's fallen asleep, but when he turns to look Neku's eyes are wide open, halos of fluorescent light in them, rings of rapt attention. 

"Well, now. Quid pro quo. Tell me something about yourself. It's only fair."

At this, Neku almost smiles.

"I used to be really into graffiti. I hid a shitload of spray paint from my parents. I never tagged my name or anything. Sometimes I saw a wall and I knew that something belonged there, and it was something I could paint. I did it a lot: after school, during weekends, in the mornings. Whenever I had any spare time I'd literally go around painting the town," he says, staring at his hands. "I learned some things about other street artists. There's this one artist called CAT. CAT's work was—well, I hope his or her stuff's still around—freaking phenomenal. Honestly? I was pretty confused. Why would you pay so much for the ticket to a solo exhibition in a gallery when this entire town is CAT's exhibition? The best thing is CAT's work is always amazing, but it's always so suited to the place where it is. Kind of like CAT is saying: hey, pay attention to this second. Enjoy it. Enjoy where you are and who you are. Any time I felt low, I'd seek out a CAT spot—there's an app for that, by the way—and just hang around, look at CAT's art, enjoy the moment by myself."

Of course Neku would be completely obsessed with Sanae's graffiti artist alter ego. There's a joke he can make about that, or he could say, _ah, I think I know who you're talking about; would you like me to introduce you?_ The impulse is quelled by Joshua's realization that he wants to see what it looks like when Neku gets to camp and sees Sanae tagging something. How high would his eyebrows rise? How far down would his jaw drop? Would he laugh, or would he cry, or would he try to get an autograph on his arm? Joshua has run out of things to hypothesize about. This is not a multiple-trial experiment. Random errors will not be averaged out; he will only have one chance to see how surprise changes Neku's expression, and he will only have his eyes to record it.

The next morning, he wakes up, and Neku is humming something Joshua recognizes as Vivaldi as he takes stock of their belongings. He keeps his eyes closed and his breathing even.

“I know you’re awake, jackass,” Neku says, throwing a can of soup, which lands painfully against Joshua’s ribs. He sits up, frowning, but Neku isn’t looking at him; he’s touching the wall, a shadow falling on his features like a veil. The tune he hums is something Joshua wouldn’t know if someone told him its title.

* * *

Neku pulls into the driveway of the suburban house then kills the engine. They both sit silently like that, in the dark, listening for zombie activity. Joshua checks his watch, twelve minutes later, and shrugs at his companion; if zombies _are_ around, they aren’t making themselves heard. Might as well come out and shoot when they have to. Neku nods reluctantly. They both step out, guns at the ready, but there is only silence. The street lamps are still flickering; the house is shrouded blue, with dark windows. Joshua goes first, briskly walking towards the front door, and he can hear Neku calling him, startled, and jogging after him.

The door opens. Against his saner instincts, Joshua gropes around for a light switch. He finds one. _Click_ , it goes under his finger, and the room is suddenly illuminated. A brown sofa, complete with blue throw pillows, sits in the middle of the room; a smashed television set rather forlornly stands a few meters away from it. The carpet is purple, with a few blotchy stains—perhaps coffee. Joshua glances at Neku, who seems to be thinking the same thing: _zombies._ He digs a knife out from the pocket of his pants and presses the sharp edge into his palm; Neku glares at him but doesn’t stop him. A bead of blood appears, then a trickle, until a drop makes it to the ground, creating an uneven circle on the paneled floor.

Something that was once a woman stumbles its way to them, and Neku puts it down with a calm, steady shot. Joshua lets more blood fall to the floor.

Two more—children this time, barely more than ten. Joshua kills them because Neku shakes.

A string of drops mark the floor in front of Joshua’s feet. Blood drips on blood, red on red, but no other zombies come out to them, so Joshua puts on a bandage on the shallow wound and wipes the spots on the floor using some tissue. They both step over the zombies and head upstairs, checking for clean beds. Neither can keep his mouth shut for too long. (“Man, that sofa looks like my grandma’s casserole after three days outside the fridge.” “Any studies linking house color to zombie invasion? This house is like a traffic cone.” "If I owned this house I'd fire the painter. Twice." "Ah, look, a fuzzy toilet seat cover with a mysterious stain. I'll give you fifty dollars if you taste it and another fifty if you make an educated guess about what it is." "Dude, _no_.")

“So this one belongs to the boy earlier,” Joshua guesses. No one is around to tell him whether or not he’s right, but the name on the closet is Genta.

“Probably, yeah,” Neku agrees. He looks at the inanimate cat Joshua is holding up. “Hey, Shiki has a stuffed toy she carries around everywhere, even though she’s _way_ too old for it. It’s like this black pig thing. I don’t get it. It’s weird and heavy and it takes up a lot of space, but she loves it.”

“And you’ll never truly understand it, Neku. It’s impossible to truly understand other people.”

Turning to him, Neku raises an eyebrow and goes, “You think so?”

“I _know_ so. Think of it like this: each person has his or her own sunglasses, but they all have lenses that are colored differently. They can’t be taken off. So if I have blue-tinted lenses and you have green-tinted ones, no matter how much you try to tell me that something you see is green, I’ll still think of it as blue. Neither of us is right. Each mind is governed by its own special logic that will never work in another. Ergo,” Joshua says, and doesn’t continue, making a little demonstrative gesture with his hand.

“Who wants to see the world through blue lenses, anyway?” Neku quips as he takes the stuffed toy from Joshua and places it back on the bed. His hand lingers on it for a heartbeat, and Joshua wonders if Neku remembers how Shiki had held hers. The Shiki in Joshua's mind is a creature formed out of Neku's stories and admiration: a skipping girl with the warmest eyes in the universe, with words that change and a light that guides. He is jealous of her in a strange, abstract way. Joshua will never be recognized as a man made even halfway out of hope or love.

There is a rumbling sound from Joshua’s stomach. The hunger pang is so sudden and so intense that it brings a brief wave of nausea with it.

“No, Neku, I’m fine, who needs a cheeseburger; it’s probably expired,” Neku says, his voice about an octave higher than it usually is. This time, it is Joshua that rolls his eyes. They come down the stairs again.

Neku slips into a doorway to the left, out of sight. The corpses of the mother and her children are starting to stink up the living room; with the wound on his hand, though, Joshua wouldn’t risk burying them just yet.

“Pop tarts! There are pop tarts,” Neku yells from the kitchen. Joshua walks over. “It’s been forever since I had these. Do these people have a toaster or what?”

There is a disproportionate amount of delight in Neku’s eyes. Joshua thinks, also, that he would benefit from a haircut. It’s when Neku looks at him with his eyebrows scrunched almost comically together, then hastily turns away that Joshua realizes he’s been staring, so he turns almost as quickly and starts rummaging through the cupboards, hoping for marshmallows.

That’s when he hears the sound. A low, guttural roar, slick with wetness, fills the air behind him. He whips round but not quickly enough. The zombie has Neku pinned against the fridge without a weapon and is going for his jugular with its decaying, sickly teeth. A white-hot lightning strike of panic hits Joshua. He doesn’t think about what he does next. One moment he is by the counter, with a can of corned beef; the next he has his uncut hand out, fingers digging deep into the corpse’s rotting neck. The can he’d been holding clatters to the floor. With all his strength Joshua throws the zombie down, then pumps it full of lead. The scent of rot rises from it like steam, drifts into his nose; Joshua feels bile rise in his throat, bitter water signaling nausea, and turns away. That’s the problem with these things. They don’t smell, unlike normal corpses, until they’ve been truly and properly killed. A scent would make them so much easier to detect.

His shoes are ruined, he thinks ruefully as he catches his breath. They’ll have to clean out the kitchen. Joshua washes his hands in the sink to get rid of the awful flesh that remains on them, the fluids that coat his skin. Behind him, Neku slides down to the floor, breathing hard enough to be audible, and when Joshua kneels down next to him he’s shivering.

“Thanks,” Neku manages. Joshua wants to say, ‘no problem’, or something to that effect, but a vision bludgeons him and leaves him cold: the zombie ravaging Neku’s neck, dark red liquid smeared all over the clean fridge door; Joshua shooting at the zombie and hitting both, then digging a single grave. So Joshua says nothing, presses his cleaner hand next to Neku’s head and leans in close to kiss him. It might just be guilt, he tells himself. It doesn't concern him for long, though, because a heady cloud is already settling in around him. Neku makes a little noise in the back of his throat, pulling Joshua against him. His hands are still trembling a little, even against Joshua’s neck. For the first time in a long while the dirt stains and blood splatters of the world fall away. He kisses Neku without restraint, without refinement, and the tips of his shoes drag across the soiled floor but he doesn’t care. Neku’s teeth brush against his lip and Joshua does not care about anything else much. In the end he gives up and lets himself fall against Neku, who laughs a full-body laugh into Joshua’s hair.

“So,” he says, “before _that_ happened, what were we doing, anyway?”

“You were saying something about pop tarts,” Joshua murmurs, pulling away and sitting with his back against the fridge like Neku.

At this, Neku snorts, then he goes, “Nah, it wasn’t important—hey, maybe we should sweep the house again, after this, see if we missed anything,” and he moves, turns his head, touches his mouth against Joshua’s before he can ask what ‘this’ entails. Before all this Joshua would never have considered making out with a corpse not five feet away from him, but here it is, here he is doing just that and it feels as good as seeing another morning, each new hell-raising day.

* * *

The sun has only started to color the sky outside when Neku bursts into the kitchen. Joshua hears his heavy, panicked footsteps, and turns, pan still in hand. Neku is wide-eyed and gasping. He crosses the floor to where Joshua is frying the bacon, relief flooding his expression, and takes a long, grateful look at their breakfast.

“Still here, huh.”

“Of course I am, dear,” Joshua says, turning off the stove. He slides the bacon out of the frying pan to the two plates on the table and Neku takes his seat behind one. The sunlight streams in from the back window, bright across the sticky, drying puddle of zombie blood and bits of flesh by Joshua’s feet. He steps around it and sits down across Neku; they look at each other for a moment and it’s a little ridiculous how now, Joshua could get up and kiss him, for no reason whatsoever. The thought is incredibly tempting, what with the morning falling on Neku’s face like that, his hair glinting copper, his crooked teeth like little white flashes as he talks.

Joshua has always been shit at resisting temptation.

He continues to be terrible at it, for days afterwards, whenever Neku stops driving and pulls over at the side of the road; whenever a zombie comes particularly close to ending it for either of them; whenever Neku looks a certain way and it sets off something in Joshua, a deep and untapped warmth. He memorizes the ladder-snake of Neku's spine, the angle of his clavicle, the spiral of his ear with his eyes, his fingertips, his mouth. Sometimes they're so lazy that they make no progress.  _It's pretty safe here,_ Neku would say, lax and heavy against Joshua's shoulder,  _so staying around for a while isn't so bad, right?_ Sometimes he just plain forgets where he is because Neku is flush against him, his hands warm under Joshua’s shirt. Thoughts break off into monosyllabic incoherencies. It should be easy, this, leaning into him, getting lost. Joshua pretends that they’ve all the time in the world, where the only danger comes from the uneasy stares of strangers walking past.

"I can make you meeting CAT happen. I'm sure he'll like you,” he says absentmindedly, brushing his fingers through Neku’s hair. The air is cold but Neku holds him here, in place. Joshua feels rooted to him.

Neku huffs out a beat of exasperated laughter. “You have the best sense of timing ever in the history of freaking everything,” he murmurs against Joshua’s hips, shutting him up, teeth brushing fabric that's already sliding down. Then he glances up for a liquid, quicksilver second, eyes glistening in shadow under lowered lids, and Joshua is so lightheaded that the sky sings inside his head.

* * *

“Cigarette, boss?” Sanae offers, and Joshua takes it from him a little tetchily. He hasn’t had one since he was eighteen, but now seems a good time as any, and he trusts Sanae’s taste. The older man flicks open a jet-black lighter. The blue flame wraps itself around the end of the cigarette, and afterwards, the orange glow is stark against the night.

“I don’t know why we saved him,” Joshua says, exhaling smoke. He's glad for the dinner they had. Sanae packs the kind that can cause vomiting if one is unprepared. “If we hadn’t, we don’t have to think about how to shut him up without shooting him again.”

“Now, that ain’t right,” says Sanae with a crooked grin. His shades are off, tucked into a pants pocket. His eyes are no less indecipherable for it; Joshua wonders when he'll be able to do that as well as Sanae does. “He was innocent, J. You killing him would’ve been straight-up murder, and you might not feel it now, but your conscience is gonna thank me in the future. Assuming there is one.”

“Assuming there is one,” Joshua agrees. He takes a long drag; it’s been a while, so the nicotine spreads over his nerves and coats them with relaxation, letting fumes into his head. The way things are going now, he might as well take up the habit. The outcome will be the same either way.

“You should know something,” says Sanae, not looking at him.

“Here’s hoping it’s something pleasant.”

Joshua knows it won’t be.

“When you came in and all your work was gone, all the research files deleted—that wasn’t the work of a rival company and a smart hacker. It was me.” Sanae seems to take a moment to let that sink in, and the dull surprise thuds against Joshua’s chest in a pained squeeze. He doesn’t know whether to be grateful or enraged. He doesn’t know how to feel both at the same time. “But I guess I wasn’t fast enough.”

Another drag goes a long way to aid the appearance of recovery, of not really being shocked. “At least you tried. Did you actually work out whoever was responsible for selling that sample that went missing _before_ you decided to put a stop to my work?”

Sanae is quiet for a moment. Then, he raises his head and says, “I told the name I found out to Konishi. Don’t worry, I double-checked five or six times. You don’t have to get your hands dirty.”

“Is that what this is?” Joshua asks, making a wide, sweeping gesture that has Sanae jumping away in order to avoid the tip of Joshua's cigarette. He doesn’t mean for it come out so bitter. His hands, now only dusted with the scent of the cigarette he’s smoking, are perhaps dirtier than Konishi’s will ever be. It was his project. His gamble. His failure. It wasn’t him who had stolen and sold the stuff, but he had _created_ it. Perhaps he should grow a beard and start calling himself Alfred.

His friend frowns. “Blaming yourself ain’t gonna fix anything. You’ve got a sharp mind, Josh—put it to use.”

“Of course. We’ll discuss cleaning up the mess in a little while. But first,” Joshua turns towards the hospital’s glass doors, the crosses printed on them, “the Sakuraba issue.”

Dropping what remains of his cigarette on the concrete and stepping on it, Joshua follows Sanae towards the light coming from it; a beacon in the darkness; a shining triumph of medicine over nature. Not for much longer, Joshua thinks. Not if things go the way he predicts they will, and he is very rarely wrong about what lies ahead.

* * *

They’re one floor below the one Joshua’s most familiar with. Already the building’s triggered a memory in Neku—one of meeting Sanae, actually; it builds upon itself; Joshua can see it bubbling, the uneasiness on Neku’s features like steam escaping a burning pool.

Three shots, a horde falls at Neku’s feet. He jumps and twists, bashing in the skull of a zombie coming at Joshua with a crowbar he got from fuck knows where. From his right a decaying hand shoots out, and Joshua crashes into a chair, which squeezes the zombie between closing lift doors; it oozes and squelches as the lift moves down, to the basement, half of a monster sticking out of heavy steel. A breath of iron and decomposition; a red-black-green mass lunges at him. Neku’s shots slam it against a steel locker. Gravity drags it down, leaving a red-black trail down the locker door. Neku nods at the stairs on the right, still looking nervous. Each corner is another half-opened gate to hell.

The lab is almost pristine, almost white. Some test tubes remain cleanly in their stands. An Erlenmeyer flask is tipped over, free of cracks. No other trace of glassware remains. There’s a gigantic mess in the corner, though, just one corner, and Joshua remembers it a little more vividly than he’d like. The stain is still there. The stink is still there. Minamimoto’s cap floats in a puddle of soupy meat. Just six feet away, Konishi’s elegant black glasses are snapped in half; next to it there’s a scorch mark flowering on the floor where they’d destroyed the first batch. With practiced motions, Joshua absent-mindedly snatches a lab coat from the rack and pulls it on. The fabric is scratchy and familiar against his skin.

“…Josh?”

Neku sounds so, so far away.

“Check out the files. We might find something useful,” he says.

_You’ve got a sharp mind, Josh—put it to use._

It seems almost poetic, he muses. The trigger will be here, and it will be pulled. Joshua places his hands on a plastic table. He breathes in the smell and finds it full of rot; he misses the medicinal scent, the bottle-fumes. No trace of that now. Death is the air no matter where you go.

“Hey, look, this guy is like, practically your twin,” Neku says, laughing like it scratches against his throat, high and terrified. In a brief flash of ridiculousness, Joshua is reminded of the hyenas from The Lion King, cackling amongst green mountain-fumes. Perhaps he should've watched some more movies with Neku—they _did_ pass through several houses with Disney collections—but as with many other things, it is far too late now. Here comes the last second. Here comes the last minute. The last hour was the same as the one before, and before, and before. And then the hysterical glee leaves Neku; his voice is thin with disbelief: “Oh. What the fuck. Josh, tell me this isn’t—“

When he turns to smile with the gun steady in his hands it is the lightest thing to do in the world.

“I could tell you, but I wouldn’t want to lie to you, dear.”

The safety clicks. The shattering of Neku’s composure makes itself known when it stutters in his eyes. In the end it isn’t the world that destroys him after all, but one man.

“Joshua.”

The name cracks.

“Yes?”

“Shit, just—just calm down, okay? It’s—“

“I shot you once. I’ll do it again if you let me,” Joshua says, whispers, even, like they’re back in the car and the sky is getting lighter; sleep running sluggish in their motions; fever-warm. “So what’ll it be, partner? You do intend to defend yourself, don’t you? A game isn’t fun if you know you’re going to win.”

“You’re so fucked up,” Neku spits. He probably means it to sound angry but the words splinter. “What are you _playing_ at? You think this is a game? I’m some sort of piece on whatever fucking board you see in your head? _Fuck you_ , Joshua.”

His hand shakes, but Neku has always had exceptional aim. With a flick the safety’s off his gun, too, and behind that, Neku’s anger in glassy pinpricks at the edges of his eyes. Joshua counts down out loud and thinks of Sanae mixing mint julep on idle Sundays; a moving cell viewed using a light microscope; bright, blocky colors on a gray wall at the end of an alley that no one knows of; the lightness of a violin in his hands; daisies in the hospital gardens; stupid titration games with Megumi and Sanae, half-hungover; Neku lurching forward, cursing as Joshua brakes too suddenly, chest straining against the seatbelt; the way he opens his eyes as though his dreams are another, lovelier world entirely; the hundred different ways he can say Joshua's name; the tough skin on his fingertips like a guitarists’—

“Zero,” Joshua says, squeezing the trigger.

* * *

“If you think about it, really, it makes sense,” Joshua says after a yawn. “The virus only infects humans. We are the most destructive species to have ever walked this planet’s surface. We reshape the Earth and pollute it. We spread by metastasis.”

Neku snorts. It’s a tiny thing but it sends a shudder down his whole body, creeping up on Joshua wherever they touch. Neku breathes and Joshua feels the expanding of his lungs, pressing them even closer together as he touches a barely-there scar on Neku’s chest. There it is, the thumping of the heart _—_ systole, systole, diastole _—_ regular and strong beneath Joshua's open palm.

“So the virus is fate’s way of wiping us off the map? You’re a ray of sunshine, huh.”

“You’ll never catch _me_ believing in karma. Still, if there really is some sort of cosmic caretaker of Earth, it’s the smart thing to do. We shouldn’t keep rotting limbs, and all,” Joshua muses. If there was some sort of cosmic creator and they never thought of getting rid of humans, Joshua would be sorely disappointed in them; he’d do it before the twenty-first century could get going, even. He could also admit it was hubris, human greed, and human curiosity, that spread first like an epidemic before the virus, but that might morph into a very similar train of thought very quickly. Instead he holds up one of Neku's hands, tracing the soft lines on it with his eyes, brushing his fingertips against bony knuckles.

“The human race is a rotting limb. Wisdom by Joshua Kiryu. If I was a shrink I’d have a freaking field day,” mumbles Neku. Then, more quietly: “It’s not like you’re totally wrong, though.”

 

* * *

 

_Click._

 

* * *

The ECG monitor is a boxy thing, its screen an unnatural dark green with a neon grid and a line graph like the bottom row of a vampire's teeth. Joshua stares at the monitor and the numbers on it. Sakuraba is stable now; everything's been taken care of; money's changed hands and hands were shaken. It was Sanae who had insisted on coming up. Something in Joshua tells him he would've been much better off not knowing Sakuraba's actual condition. Now he sees that the young man is his age, that his feet are practically Joshua's size, that there are no flower bouquets or fruit baskets around him. No next of kin, estranged family, no close friends to speak of. It could be Joshua, under different circumstances. Perhaps, if they had led different lives they could have met somewhere. He could've been Sakuraba's one link to the world. That would lead him here too, maybe, except this time he'd have a jar of the kind of peanut butter Sakuraba likes or a novel or a game console.

“So what’ll it be, J?” Sanae interrupts.

“Come now, Sanae. You know how resilient we are. Let’s see how many sunrises we can still catch.”

Sanae grins, cracking his neck. Neku Sakuraba breathes steadily on a clean bed. Whether he’ll be discharged before shit hits the metaphorical fan, Joshua doesn’t know and doesn’t care. He will already be on the road, shotgun in one hand, phone in the other, with Sanae warbling some R&B hit at the wheel. The radio will stop transmitting and television stations will broadcast dead air, but Joshua will stand over a hill and exhale.

Chuckling, Sanae says, “That's the spirit. I heard the coffee downstairs is something. They use 100 percent organic beans with some sort of magic natural fertilizer or something. I’m gonna get myself a cup. Maybe a bag if they stock any. You coming?”

Joshua shrugs. Without another word, Sanae leaves the room, taking the leather scent of his cologne with him. The air conditioner stirs the curtains. Each time Sakuraba exhales, Joshua thinks he hears the man's confusion just a few hours ago. If Sakuraba wakes up now, Joshua has no idea what to say to him. _Hello_ , maybe. _I put a bullet in you,_ not so much. He chuckles to himself and watches Sakuraba's expression, a mask of blank serenity; the  face of a brush with death. Nothing changes. True peace will only grace a man’s face in deep slumber, it looks like.

"Sweet dreams, Sakuraba," he murmurs as he walks, touching the plastic end of the hospital bed, just above the little whiteboard where Sakuraba's name is written in hesitant kanji. The door closes behind Joshua while the sound of Sanae’s whistling fades down the hallway.

* * *

Joshua can feel Neku shaking even as he is slammed against the far wall of the lab. Neku’s face is contorted in helpless, bewildered fury, tear tracks messy and half-shining; he growls incoherently and twists the gun out of Joshua’s grip, throwing it across the room.

“You ran out of bullets on the last floor. How could I be so freaking _stupid_? What if I’d really shot you, huh? What then? I go back to the car? Drive to the end of the rainbow? Do you even think about the shit you pull or are you just trying to drive the last person you know completely insane, because if you are, it’s working pretty fucking well!”

Neku’s gripping him so hard it hurts; he looks five seconds away from hitting Joshua. There are answers to those questions, really. There are words that can be said. They refuse to even form or arrange themselves. Joshua's mouth remains closed, soundless, thoughtless, as he moves to wipe the water from Neku's face. Neku slaps his hand away so forcefully that the sound cracks in the air.

“Nothing to say? Okay, that’s great, shut up when I need some actual answers from you, that’s awesome. How did you think I’d feel if I shot you?”

“Terrible,” Joshua says, which would be the truth. “But also a little relieved, I’d think.”

"You don’t even know what it’d be like if I’d shot you. I don’t even wanna know how I’d deal with myself. Just—you’re such an _asshole_ ,” Neku snarls, surging in to kiss Joshua so hard it feels like he’s trying to bruise him. Joshua lets himself gets pushed. Neku’s rage is a physical thing; he slams Joshua’s wrist up above his head, bites his lips and his tongue, wrestles him in place. Then he exhales: “Don’t make my decisions for me. You tell me what you were thinking the first time around and this time, and _I_ decide whether or not I’m gonna forgive you. I decide whether or not you get my trust. Got it?”

“Got it,” Joshua sighs, as Neku pulls him close, mumbling angry nothings against his neck. Does he really get away with it this easily, with Neku flush against him, holding him like he thinks Joshua will slip away, with nothing but some angry words and a shove? Closing his eyes, Joshua wills the winds in his head to blow the question away. In other people there might be a distance between the soul and the shadow it casts but in Joshua that distance is nil. His heart is its own darkness, which is a truth he had run away from, once, when he was much younger. No longer.

The way Neku is saying his name rips into him like a physical blow. He wants nothing more than to apologize, but it dawns on Joshua that he doesn’t know how.

* * *

The morning light casts blue shapes on the steering wheel. Some silent tune tells the girl in the grass skirt to keep twirling her hips; there is no sound coming from the back seat. Most of the landmarks detailed on the map have become dark and derelict but they serve his purposes well enough, until the landscape becomes familiar and Joshua can finally tell where he is. A patrol is making its way back to camp with a red-haired man and a woman with dyed pink hair in the lead. His hair is the color of Neku’s in the milky sunlight. Joshua watches them move as he parks near a small red sedan he’s never seen before with a one-eyed teddy bear on its dashboard, in a clearing sparsely dotted with grass. The landscape is dappled with patches of brightness.

If he strains his ears, he might hear birdsong, or the flapping of wings, the chirp of an early cricket. He is almost tempted to think about how quiet the world it really is without humans around, but really, noise has been around since there was air for it to travel through. If he thinks about it, really, it's all just electrical impulses, muscle movements, and air vibrations. You can break down the sound of Neku's voice into components. Construct some sort of balanced equation. The arrow is entropy. _  
_

_(“How many times do I owe you my life now? This is getting kind of stupid.”_

_A laugh. Joshua shifts dirty cloth out of the way. In an instant his world shrinks and catapults almost a light year’s worth of distance. This is someone else’ hand moving, touching the edges of the wound, someone else’s eyes taking in the unmistakable sight._

_Someone else’s voice droning out: “Well, it looks like you don’t owe me anything this time.”)_

He kills the engine and makes his way outside. The pink-haired woman looks up, squinting at him, and Joshua salutes her exactly the way Sanae would.

“Is Sanae in?”

“Sanae?”

“Hanekoma. Is he there? Tell him it’s Josh.”

She gives him a strange look before disappearing past a gate. Sentries check the rest of the patrol for bites. The guy with Neku’s hair color hangs back and smiles at him, lazy and friendly, a sun-in-your-eyes-and-life-is-a-trip grin.

Then, loudly, he yells: “Nice to meet you, Josh! I'm Kariya. Try to not get killed while Uzuki fetches your friend. He’s a real wise guy, by the way. A zen scholar who just needs a good shave. Hope you’re from the same stock.”

Joshua shrugs. Neku would never smile like that, but Kariya looks nothing like him, anyway.

 _(“Fuck, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t ask you to do it, but I_ can’t _—“_

_“At least you’re giving me the choice.”_

_“Because I’m not a manipulative ass," Neku says, and Joshua smiles at that, shrugging. "Say hi to CAT for me. I wrote a letter. I've been writing it since I was like, sixteen. It's in my bag and it can't stay there.” He chokes on the last word._

_Joshua kisses him, close-mouthed and careful, kisses his cheek and the tip of his nose and the skin between his eyes and memorizes his face: the angle of each eyelash, the curve of the light on the bridge of his nose, each iris its own ocean._

_“It won’t be the first time I’ll have to do this.”_

_Neku fails to grin. “Yeah. I know. Practice is supposed to make perfect, so don’t mess it up.”)_

From the gate Sanae emerges, smiling like the sun, going, “hey, you never called! It’s good to have you back,” and here he is, slapping Joshua’s back, pulling him towards the rest of the patrol. He hasn’t changed much. His hair’s a bit longer, but he doesn’t trust anyone but Joshua to cut his hair. If Neku saw him. If Neku saw him. If Neku _—_ Joshua cannot continue that sentence. He tries, again and again. A voice in the gloom spelling out CAT's messages and CAT's work. The way Neku smiles when he sees a tagged wall. _  
_

He says, softly: “Something’s bothering you. Penny for your thoughts?”

“Later. Introductions first,” Joshua says. He looks behind him and catches himself. There’s no one there. Phantom footsteps do not belong to someone with an extra can of soda. The scent of him passing Joshua by is a ghost, but he knows better than that. Ghosts don't exist, at least not in this atmosphere. There’s just Sanae and the inquisitive concern behind the lenses of his sunglasses, and Joshua will deal with it later, he swears. 

 _(_ _“If you meet Shiki…”_

_“Yes?”_

_"Treat her like she’s the best person in the whole world, okay? She deserves it.”_

_“I’ll be on my best behavior,” he promises. Neku’s pulse throbs beneath his fingers. What warm wrists._

_Neku laughs loudly, wheezing out: “Wow, that’s reassuring, coming from you.”_ _)_

“Kids,” Sanae starts, because he knows he can get away with it. “Meet Joshua. We’ve known each other since he was in his nappies— _ow_ , okay, since he was fifteen, take a chill pill, J—and he’s a little shit but you might just warm up to him. J, say hi.”

“The pleasure is all mine,” Joshua says. Sanae makes a little gesture, his eyebrows rising, like _see what I mean_? Kariya chuckles.

“Koki Kariya. This here’s Uzuki Yashiro, who’ll blast you to bits if you so much as walk wrong.”

Joshua smiles at both of them and shakes their hands. Both of them have rough, scar-crossed hands. He wonders what kind of people they were before. The others have put away their guns but she hasn’t yet; the suspicion in her eyes is a glint of daylight. The contrast between her and Kariya is startling. She’s stretched as taut as a string, while he is languid, relaxed, moving like he has all the time in the world. They might not be bad company.

_(He opens the car door, gets in, and shuts it. With steady hands, he starts the engine. Once you repeat a sequence of actions enough times it becomes almost automatic. There’s a patch of dirt just to the right of the building’s doors marked by a broken shovel, colored using free purple nail polish—he’d found a bottle sitting in a ruined convenience store rack. Neku’s gym bag sits in the passenger seat. Briefly, Joshua entertains the thought of throwing it away. It would be the proper thing to do. Anything that has to do with Neku will just make him sentimental._

_Joshua frowns as he looks at the clouds and hears Neku’s voice saying: you wanna go cloud-watching? Are you ten freaking years old? A shoulder bumping amiably against his. Let’s go raid that stand for hot dogs instead. It dawns on him that there would be no point in getting rid of the bag._

_So he flips open the atlas, to the dog-eared page, where a path is marked in bright orange marker. It shouldn’t be him reading it, really, it never should’ve been; back when they’d parked near the lab he’d left the book open, even, so Neku wouldn’t even need to find the page. He steps on the pedal. Perhaps his ghost won’t follow him back to Sanae’s camp._

_What he would give for warmth, even a phantom touch of it, the scent of Neku’s skin wafting in through every window he will ever pass.)_

Then Sanae puts his hand on the shoulder of a tall, thin girl with messily-cropped dark hair and a huge pair of glasses. Shyly, she looks at the ground, causing Sanae to tell her all about Joshua being more bark than bite. She manages to hold his eye for three seconds as she sticks out her hand, which is stiff and cold, but Joshua takes it. (People compliment him on his handshakes all the time. It was one of the first things he learned from Sanae.)

“I’m Shiki Misaki,” she says. Joshua wants to throw his head backward and cackle until the sun comes down, until Neku tells him to shut up and fuck off, or kisses him into silence.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Shiki.”

“Um, you’ve been driving around, right? I was just wondering, well… There’s something I want to talk to you about.”

She fidgets. Joshua smiles his most charming smile: the one that makes Neku’s eyes go wide as he laughs and says, _see, from that face no one’s gonna predict that inside you’re pretty much the Devil._ The valleys and hills of his voice are still as vivid as they were yesterday. When Shiki looks at him expectantly, Joshua imagines the way Neku must have seen her, must have laughed with her. A fractal of light dances on the lenses of her glasses; she smells a little like cheap coconut body spray. It's funny, because despite the mountains of idealization Joshua's built up about her in his mind, he can see who she is, really: a nice, plain and awkward little girl, who could become so important to Neku because of sheer proximity and the fact that Neku was lonely, living with a long-denied starvation for human contact. He can’t see why Neku loves ( _loved_ ) her so much, but maybe he will with time.

 _(It's a while after the lab when Neku decides to tell Joshua the verdict. Joshua is going through his bag, going through Neku's, making a checklist of what they need and what they have. It's the most mundane of tasks. Lately he's been letting Neku give him the most tedious chores, almost unconsciously. Yes, they have about five boxes of energy bars; god forbid they'll actually have to rely on them. That must be the worst fate that can befall man, Joshua says, to thin air, when a pair of hands twist him around and makes him drop a box of Hi-Fit Granola Squares™ on his feet._ _  
_

_"I don't forgive you yet," Neku says, oddly enough, almost apologetically. "I can't."_

_"Ah," Joshua says. He doesn't mean to feel the disappointed pang that echoes all the way to the back of his throat._

_"But," Neku continues, placing one skinny hand beneath Joshua's chin and making Joshua look up, into Neku's wide, trembling eyes, "I trust you. You're my partner. We're in this together. And we're better off like this."  
_

_Like what, Joshua almost asks jokingly, before Neku pulls him close, slowly, hesitantly, and then with a quiet, firm certainty that feels like it speaks the truth. Afterwards he tells Neku that he messed up inventory and now he'll have to do it, but Neku only nips his jaw and goes, "I trust you with the numbers too, Josh. So tough shit. You're just gonna have to start over," which should annoy Joshua like nothing else, but it doesn't; when he closes his eyes Neku whispers something quickly, something he can't quite catch, so Joshua just turns his head and whispers back: "Thank you for your leniency, Your Honor." Neku bursts out laughing._

_Later he'll grumble about Joshua killing the mood, but now Joshua can catch the sporadic movement of Neku's head as he laughs, the quick, tiny exhale behind each chain of laughter. The part of him that used to laugh at people for being sentimental slaves to brain chemicals is sulking in a corner of his psyche untouched by the End.)_

Joshua knows he is the best bearer of bad news. This time, though, he feels inadequate, like Neku's death and his failure to bring him to Shiki is news too big for his mind to bear processing. He can't say that he came so close to taking Neku to the two people he wanted to see the most, only to roll his body into a hastily-dug grave beside a lonely stretch of road. There is no dancing around this. The truth is a mess of blood and a gun in Joshua’s hands; fate frames things so neatly, with such great care.

“Of course," Joshua says. "I’m all ears.”

**Author's Note:**

> Unbeta-ed, so all mistakes are mine.  
> The title is from Romeo and Juliet.


End file.
